Unreal Engine renders better than NVIDIA IRAY in 1 second vs 30 minute IRAY renders-What's going on?
Flortale
Posts: 611
The following is an Unreal Engine render, in which the following image takes one second to render:
The following is a DAZ STUDIO / NVIDIA IRAY RENDER, which can take up to 30 minutes or more:
What's going on here? I understand that Unreal Engine assets are optimized, but still, ONE second render vs 30 minute renders? Something is up guys. Something is SEVERELY WRONG here.
If UNITY and Unreal Engine can produce high quality renders in less than a second, then there's no reason why NVIDIA IRAY can't adopt a mode, in which it operates at the same level as UNITY or Unreal ENgine, just for the sake of faster renders, for making animations for example.
I think companies like Unity & Unreal Engine shoudl get into the rendering business and compete against DAZ Studio, that would probably make DAZ Studio come up with a fast rendering solution.
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They are getting into the rendering business. They're increasingly pushing their rendering as a visualisation tool rather than just as a game engine.
However, there's a fundamental difference in the rendering techniques here. Game rendering engines rely on approximations of and compromises on reality, and while they're getting better at it, they are still faking the way light actually works, and it can very much show at times. In this case, it's laughable to say that the Unreal image is better.
Look at the tables in the Unreal image, where while there's enough shading to actually connect the objects to the surface, there's no real detail to the surface. Compare that to the table in the Iray image, where we can see sharp silhouettes of the objects on the table, and even reflections of the background. With exactly the same job to do (reflections on a table), Iray is providing visibly better results. But that takes a lot of processing.
In any case, emulating these results in Iray wouldn't simply be "adopting a mode", the techniques are so different that it would be building a new engine from scratch.
Dunno.... my Unreal scenes can take hours to build the lighting.
was that a preload with it built or something created there and then from scratch?
for example DAZ figures in the Unreal Editor playback in real time, but thats a preload scene, it had to build lighting and reflections again after I added the guys
your fave babe Lydia
except my retarget gives them a wide stance, am going to try a preset suggested by someone else next go
One can build fully rendered lightmapped scenes that create and save all the rendered textures for a scene as OnlyLuvCatz has done and it will take hours. Or one can do real time ray tracing as the OP points out. The real time ray tracing can be thought of as a 64 bit MP3 compared to a 320 bit MP3 that a fully realized ray trace would be. As video cards get better that gulf between real time ray tracing & fully realized ray tracing will disappear because the the "fully realized ray tracing" is actually a much simplified model of real world lighting already such that it's feasible to do it on computer to begin with.
As far as normal people and those real time ray traced animations in playable games that aren't quite ready for primetime yet the average person that isn't OCD about a game's details they are playing will not notice the lower level of details in a real time ray traced game compared to a fully realized iRay render because they'll likely never see a iRay render. They will notice the more realistic lighting created on the fly in a game they are playing though. When that technology fully matures it will make tasks of baking in lighting that OnlyLuvsCatz talks about a thing of the past.
bah, it's good enough to fake most people.
UE screenshots do usually look more lower res than Iray though. OP is a bad example because i think it's using a large pixel filter radius, but usually iray looks sharper. I'd still prefer UE engine though for most of my needs.
You can try using OctaneRender, it's like 10x faster than Iray but not sure if it compromises any quality
"What's going on here," you ask.
Well, you're not comparing two identical scenes, and I mean identical; assets, lights, textures, camera angle, image resolution. Then there's Octane, which is available for Unity.
... And as already discussed, what renderer are they using, and what short-cuts?
If you honestly think the Unreal render comes anywhere near the iray render in terms of detail or photorealism, you seriously need to have your eyes (and maybe your head, as well) examined.
We DO have the right to question the capabilities of IRay, without having to be attacked by users like @mclaugh, questioning our mental health.
As a non IRay user I think Unreal Engine is doing quite well if it's 1800 times faster than IRay.
He/she does have kind of a point, though. That Sofa is particularly... doughy looking.
It's also worth pointing out that what can pass for photorealism in still imagery (what Iray is optimized for) is very different from live motion (what UE is optimized for.)
No arguing there;)
I find that a weird comparison.
The Unreal render has very basic/limited lighting, half the props, no outside view. It looks worse on a whole bunch of levels while also being a simpler scene.
That's a serious potato vs. apple comparison.
One is a game engine the other a render engine. It's akin to biased rendering over unbiased rendering.
Funny, I am a member of a game community that use DAZ figures in unity for 3D art like what we do here in iray and the quality difference is very noticable. When i point out they can get far more superior results just using Daz Studio, they all complain about the time it takes to render over instant results with a game engine
...indeed I remember seeing a Unity render demo of a setting a while back that looked pretty convincing, until characters were added in, after which it looked more like a game instead of a photo real image.
At the time I was still rendering in Iray on the CPU which didn't take minutes, but hours (often many). As excruciating as it felt at times, the results were worth it.
As an aside, if you really want to speed up Iray:
Turn off all SSS and translucency, use old fashioned cutout style stuff.
Set max path length as low as possible. You might pull off 3 if you are lucky (and aren't using many cutout effects), maybe 4 or 5.
You can cut render time in half, or maybe even down to a third. And if you are using an art filter, you can hit a 'good enough' render in minutes.
Iray and Unreal are different kind of render engine hence comparison is unfair. Though I like to see a realtime render engine for Daz Studio for realtime HDRI view, animation, render fast while photorealistic not important etc.
In my opinion real-time pbr engines are going to be a standard for animation. Personally I can't imagine going back to 10 minutes per frame or something like that. Then it is true that the quality is not the same, but most of the time it's good enough. As for iray there's also a real-time version out there, but I have no idea if it could fit daz studio and/or if daz cares about it at all.
Real time is never going to be the way to do animation. It will always be the low budget option. Animators with the budget will keep pushing the envelope of how realistic the animation looks, even when highly stylized they'll want realistic lighting, shadows, better rigging of the characters, higher quality textures, better, more detailed, maps etc. Just compare Toy Story and Toy Story 4.
People thought I was crazy saying that Daz's real competition in the next few years will be from gaming engines rather than Poser or something like that.
Its only going to get better folks. Better and better every year, with each new software update and each new generation of GPUs. It is not there yet, but it will reach a point to where the game engines hit "good enough" for most people. And that will be a very dangerous time for Daz Studio if they have not done enough to keep up.
Do not discount what "good enough" means. MP3 took over the music world because the files were small and the quality was "good enough" for most people, convenience won them over even though the quality was clearly not as good. Video game engines are getting really close to that "good enough" stage. The pure convenience of rendering in real time is a very big deal for many people.
Indeed, my renders often have what many would consider an unacceptable amount of grain.They look ok at a glance but not on close inspection. But then I do story panels and the viewer isn't meant to dwell on each image. They are not going to be printed and framed.
Interestingly there is a thread going on in the DAZ Studio Discussion forum which is showcasing "photoreal" images. There are some very impressive examples of grainy 1970's polaroid-like pictures with minimal lighting and, I'm guessing, minimal render times. Obviously, for some purposes, good enough can be quite artistic.
On the other hand, I do like to see the HD details and SSS in my characters and a lot of that detail and effect seems to be lost when rendered in game engines.
+1
Not every 3D artist focus on photo real, Unreal image is absolutely stunning to me. Wish I could do the same with Iray in 1 minute, Rofl !!! Another awesome engine is Renderman. After watching Lion king, had to find out engine used. Amazing, stunning, beautiful graphics. Renderman is out of my price range.
MP3s are an extremely bad analogy for this. To the end-user (in this case the listener) the quality they afford may be acceptable. But if you happen to be at the production end of things MP3s are an absolute nightmare to deal with because they don't afford enough headroom for post-processing. The same applies to visual design. There's a very good reason why professional graphics workloads almost universally call for footage capture at a minimum of twice the quality of the expected final product.
The UE render at the beginning of this thread is actually an excellent example of this. The reason why it looks as good as it does (and it really does look quite good for a motion-optimized rendering engine's work) is because it started out as a collection of much higher resolution texture/geometry assets which were then heavily paired down and optimized at compile time to deliver the amount of apparent visual quality you see onscreen. If the original scene assets had started out at exactly the same level of quality in which they now appear, I can quarantee you that people would be singing a very different tune as to how good Unity Engine is doing.
I think this example would have been more instructive if it was the same scene rendered two ways. The fact it's two different scenes means we can't compare the quality of the lighting directly. Nevertheless it's true that Unreal Engine is becoming a bit of a beast for rendering. I really wish Daz would make a native exporter for it. It's a real pain to have to fix up things like eyes and in some cases rigging because... FBX. In fact a general gripe of mine is it's very difficult to get a toolchain going from Daz to anything else without a lot of messing about, fixing up foot bones for heels, grafts and so forth. Unfortunately I think this would cost Daz a couple of full-time developers. That's kind-of expensive (opportunity cost mostly).
1 second vs 30 minutes and the quality is pretty much what most of us would deem as acceptable for hobbyists like most of us.
You've got a very good point Flortale. If it was 20 minutes vs 30 minutes we'd yawn. But 1 second vs 30 or more minutes tells me we might he waiting a long time for not much pay-off.
Even if I lowered render quality in DS to 10% I'd never get a render of this clarity in one second.
I use UE4 for the very reason it does awesome fast renders
was just pointing out though there is a bit more to it, lighting is baked and reflections
for a single image DAZ studio is definitely a faster workflow, for an ArchVis walkthrough Unreal wins hands down
You could, if you spent all the time baking all the lighting and reflections... but then that takes time too.
I don't have much of an opinion, though I'm finding the conversation fascinating. I'd like to know, though, what set is this above? I searched for "Loft", and don't think I found it...
anybody know?
More on topic, I agree that Iray is slow, but even against render programs like Keyshot I always find that Iray can actually be quite easy to get very specific results.
It's this one: https://www.daz3d.com/ny-living-room
Ciao
TD